Milk Money

Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

Kardashian, Kirk

Publication Year: 2012

The failing economics of the traditional small dairy farm, the rise of the factory mega-farm with its resultant pollution and disease, and the uncertain future of milk
There’s something un-American and illogical about a market system where the price of a product bears no relation to the cost of its inputs. Yet we have lived with such a scheme in the dairy industry for decades: retail milk prices have stayed the same, while milk prices paid to farmers have plummeted. The dairy business is at the heart of the culture and economy of Vermont, just as it is of many other states. That fact meant little to Kirk Kardashian until he started taking his daughter to daycare at a dairy farm a few miles from his Vermont home—a farm owned by the same family for generations, but whose owners were now struggling to make ends meet. Suddenly, the abstractions of economics and commodities markets were replaced by the flesh and blood of a farm family whom he greeted every day.
In the tradition of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, Kardashian asks whether it is right that family farmers in America should toil so hard, produce a food so wholesome and so popular, and still lose money. This gripping investigation uncovers the hidden forces behind dairy farm consolidation, and explains why milk—a staple commodity subject to both government oversight and industry collusion—has proven so tricky to stabilize. Meanwhile, every year we continue to lose scores of small dairy farms. With passion, wit, and humor, Milk Money shows where we are now, how we got here, and where we might be going.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Foreword

Vermont’s early agricultural history was dominated by the farming
of sheep, for the mills of New England required wool for spinning
and weaving. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, sheep and
wool production was on the decline, and Vermont’s fertile valleys
and pasture-rich hills made the state an ideal ...

Preface

I wrote this book because of an irksome incongruity. In the spring
of 2009 I was driving my daughter eight miles every morning to
daycare, and on the way I would listen to Morning Edition and the
local news on Vermont Public Radio. Almost every day, it seemed,
there was one story or another on the

2. The First Dairy Farmers

A young woman in Bavaria is digging in the dirt. It is a cool, cloudy
day in the fall of 2010. Around her stretches the lush, rolling farmland
of southeastern Germany: freshly cut hay fields dotted with white
plastic hay bales. She takes a break, looks up, and notes the serenity
in the air. Big, yellow earth-moving excavators ...

4. Milk Gone Wild

The American dairy industry is a sprawling, $150 billion per year
business, with reams of statistics, charts, and graphs plotting every
data point imaginable. Out of that noise, two signals rise to the
surface: milk price and supply. They are closely related, of course,
but treated very differently. Think of the ...

5. The Environment [Includes Image Plates]

Tom Frantz is surrounded by milk, but you won’t find any in his
refrigerator. “I’ve been suing and fighting this industry,” he says. “I’m
not about to support it.”
A retired high school math teacher, Frantz is tall and laid-back,
with frizzy gray hair, a mustache, and tinted square glasses. He lives ...

Insert [Image Plates]

6. The Workers

Early one morning in the spring of 2009, Jose Obeth Santiz Cruz
awoke and dressed for the biggest adventure of his life. A fresh-faced
nineteen-year-old with boyish Mayan features, he was born in San
Isidro, a small town of lush hills in southwestern Mexico in the state
of Chiapas, just a few miles from the Pacific coast. For a long time, the
people of San Isidro grew and sold coffee ...

7. The Animals

If you’re like most Americans, there’s a space in your brain reserved
for the image of a dairy farm. You might not realize it, but there’s a
battle raging for control of that space. In one corner is the animal
rights movement, which wants you to picture pain and cruelty when
you think of a dairy farm. In the other ...

8. Monopoly Money

On a sunny day in mid-September 2009, during the depths of the
dairy crisis of that year, hundreds of dairy farmers streamed into
the city gymnasium in St. Albans, Vermont, to see a show. They
came, young and old, weathered and ruddy, and sat down in folding
chairs lined up on the polyurethaned ...

9. Grass-Fed, Free-Range, Streamline Baby

Nobody knows when the last small dairy farm will milk its last
cow; when the kinetics of consolidation and ruthless efficiency
will defeat the inertia of tradition and community; when the worship
of the Cheap will finally overtake our allegiance to the Good.
Given the rate of farm loss in states like ...

Acknowledgments

I first uttered my idea for this book to my friend Tom Zoellner on a
quiet evening on the Dartmouth quad. An author himself, he paid
no mind to the fact that I’d never before written a book. Instead he
talked me through it, gave me encouragement and technical advice, ...

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